“Hello, Carol.”
“Don’t bother being polite, Reg,” Carol said. “It doesn’t look good on you.” She was weaving slightly, actually swaying in place, much in the manner of an actor impersonating a drunk, I thought. Here was an example of a dramatic cliché’s analogue in reality.
“We’re about to begin rehearsal, Carol. I suppose you’ve come to take a few last-minute costume measurements?”
“Fuck you.”
“Let’s not have one of our scenes, Carol, not out here in front of the boy, please?”
“Look who’s talking. If it isn’t the protector of youth himself.” She addressed Billy, “I’ll bet you’re fond of your teacher, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” She seemed very unsteady on her feet. Her voice sounded hysterical and mean. “It’s going to rain! Have you ever fucked in the rain? Your teacher likes to fuck in the rain!”
“Jesus, Carol.”
“He likes to fuck in the rain and he likes it on top of his desk and in cars and in other people’s houses!”
By now people had accumulated, a circle of actors and actresses, a few passersby, no faculty or fellow academic deans, I hoped, everyone gathered to relish the spectacle of Carol crying, “I was going to have a baby! This man wouldn’t let me have our baby!”
Billy, I noticed, wore a surprisingly composed (though somewhat glassed-over) expression, as if he were accustomed to violent exhibitionism in adults. He looked as though nothing could be more natural to him than a drunken woman’s fury.
“I’m sorry, son,” I said to the boy when Carol eventually ceased yelling. I had the uneasy feeling that I was in some way giving an expert rendering of Billy’s real father, a man who must’ve been lacking — if our episode on the college lawn could be used as an indicator — backbone.
“It’s cool,” sighed Billy.
Then the rain came. The first drops were followed by wind and a great, rolling thunderclap. Tree branches swayed, and faeries scampered down from their platforms; then forked lightning struck nearby and the sky was instantly, ghostly white. Cast and crew began racing off in different directions. It was one of those thoroughly drenching gales that mark the beginning of summer — there was no point trying to stay dry. I reached out and took Carol by the arm, to comfort her and steady her. Rainwater soaked her hair and matted it in clumps. “Let’s go indoors and get you wrapped in a warm towel,” I shouted over the thunder; and she tugged her arm away and staggered to the edge of Puck’s hole. She gave me one of her powerful, inimitable, disgusted looks, then leaned over, braced herself with her hands on her knees, and vomited into the pit. It happened quickly and was over before Billy or I could respond in a helpful way. A couple of heaves and Carol spat out the last. She looked terrible, like a witch in the Scottish play, I thought, or one of those modern descendants of crones on heaths, the living dead who climb from graves in horror movies. She was intensely drunk, of course. To Billy — she was looking mostly at the boy, though presumably Carol was thinking of me, or maybe neither Billy nor me — she said, “Look at you. You make me sick. You’re like your father. He does whatever he wants with people. He’s a shit. There’s no love in this family.”
Then she reeled away across the green. Billy and I watched Carol lurch around a corner and disappear behind Lunbeck Hall; then we turned, flustered and embarrassed, two men sharing a burden of humiliation, and walked together in the opposite direction. Rain was in our faces and our hands were buried in our pockets. Wind and water forced our eyes downward. Our shoes squished. Puddles were everywhere.
It was Billy who spoke first. “I doubt if I could run like that if I’d just barfed.”
This comment made me like young Valentine immensely. I told him, “You should have played Puck.”
This was said not so much to avoid the subject of Carol, her outburst and her vomiting, as to assuage feelings of guilt and shame by making an offering of some kind, however small and meaningless. Billy replied, in the right spirit, “Demetrius rocks.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, Billy. Do you have any more of that good, strong dope?” I asked, dripping.
“No, sir. Not on me.”
“That’s too bad.” For reasons I could not name, I went on: “When I was younger, I figured I’d grow up and get married and have children. But now years have gone by, and I’m not young.”
“That’s cool,” said Billy. And he said, “Anyway, you shouldn’t marry someone with a drinking problem.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Mr. Barry?”
“Reg.”
“Reg, do you think she knows about my father?”
“Knows what? She wasn’t talking about your father. She thought I was your father, and you were our son that we never had, and you were growing up to be like me.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yes,” I agreed. But it was true that I’d had the same notion as Carol. “See you tomorrow, Billy.”
“Later, Reg.”
Rehearsal, however, was not to be, not the next day, or the day after that, or the afternoon following. The storm worsened over the course of the first night, causing trees to fall on power lines, disabling phones and cutting off electricity to homes and college buildings. Classes were canceled. By morning of the second day, Tuesday, the thunder and lightning had stopped, though the sky remained gray, pouring heavy rain. The country around here is veined with creeks; these grew into deep, fast-moving rivers. The college, safe on high ground, operated minimally on generators. A party spirit prevailed. New couples would subsequently date their union to the week of the flash flood. The disaster occurred on Thursday, when natural dams in the nearby hills gave way, releasing torrents of water derived primarily from melted winter snow. The water crashed down into the valleys, washing away roads, trees, cars, and about twenty people. The National Guard and the International Red Cross landed helicopters on the Wm. T. Barry Gymnasium parking lot. Student volunteers collected cast-off clothing, canned food, blankets, etc. A short time later, it was learned that Harrison P. Mackay, a chemistry professor with forty years at the college, had been a flood casualty. The professor, not well known to me except as a red-faced personage wearing a bow tie, was found lodged in an embankment near the town of Chesterford. An emergency meeting of deans and the president convened; sadness was expressed and a few important memories were recalled. After the meeting, President Farnham took me aside and said, “Reginald, I want you to do that play if the weather clears. Right after our service for Harrison. We’re all going to need cheering up.”
It was in this way that we came to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream on a wet field before an audience of mourners wearing black.
“We’re going to have a tough house,” I said to my young company on the evening of the show.
Folding chairs were set up on the mushy ground. Organ music, a gloomy Episcopalian dirge, drifted in from the church at the college green’s distant end. Harrison’s memorial, under way. Skies remained partly cloudy, and a light breeze blew from the south. Together we stood, cast and crew, in a circle around Puck’s hole. We weren’t holding hands, though we should have been — there was a noticeable feeling, in the group, of apprehension, a communal dread and excitation only partly attributable to normal stage fright. The hole, in the wake of the week’s rains, was a muddy pond. A duck, possibly blown far from home in the high winds a few days earlier, paddled on the surface. Fallen leaves looked like twisted miniature lily pads. These elements — water, duck, vegetation — combined to create a disturbingly powerful scene, a vastly reduced water vista that stood in relation to actual lakes as an artist’s easel studies do to fully realized, complex paintings. It was, in other words, an excellent stage-set pond, not at all unlike a classical folly from an English garden, scaled down, deceptively simple, unreal enough to seem mysterious, primordial, sad.